User quotes:Hey guys for the first time I found a site that made it easy to explain what I have to people. Now I can show my wife and hope she understands this time and doesn't think I'm crazy. Just wanted to say thanks.

What is it good for?

Roughly 1 in 20 people have some sort of color vision
deficiency. The world looks different to these people: they often find it
hard to tell red and green things apart. This often means that they sometimes
can't see things that 'color normal' people can see
(examples).

Many pictures, documents and web pages are hard for color
blind people to read because the people who designed them didn't think about
the problem. Vischeck lets them check their work for color blind visibility.
It is also interesting to anyone who is just plain curious about what the
world looks like if you're color blind.

The technical stuff

Vischeck is a computer simulation of the entire process of
human vision. The model can be divided into three parts.

The first stage includes the physical properties of the
display devices (including various CRT and LCD monitors, and
standard CYMK print on paper), the ambient lighting and the effects of physiological
factors such as corneal haze, lens opacities and short or long-sightedness which might
degrade the optical image.

The second stage of the model describes the transformation of optical image on the
retina into a neural representation of that image in the optic nerve. At this
point, visual disabilities and anomalies such as color-blindness or retinal degeneration
can be included in the model.

The final stage in Vischeck is a model of human cortical vision. At this stage, we
include information about the way in which color, spatial patterns and motion are combined
and processed in the visual cortex, to form the observer's perception of the image